THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512290001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
In 1995, for the third successive year, media attention was focused on Virginia politics. Tension between a doctrinaire conservative Republican governor and conservative but not doctrinaire Democrats controlling the state legislature set the stage for off-year legislative and local elections.
Analysts examined the results in an effort to divine the political bent of the state's voters and what that might portend for the 1996 presidential and congressional elections. When the votes were counted, Gov. George F. Allen, Virginia's most openly partisan governor in memory, had failed to engineer the election of enough Republicans to win control of the legislature. But the total vote in the state for Republican candidates exceeded the total cast for Democrats.
The Virginia Senate will be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, leaving its presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Don Beyer - a Democrat likely to be his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1997 - to tilt the chamber against the Republicans. The Democrats' edge in the House of Delegates is a tad wider.
It was an ugly political season. Both sides flung mud, but the GOP flung more. Republicans churned out pamphlets and TV ads depicting Democrats as the best friends of murderers, muggers and molesters and the worst enemies of taxpayers. Mr. Allen rolled over Democrat Mary Sue Terry in the governor's race with similar characterizations of Democrats but the juggernaut stalled in 1995.
In part that was because Mr. Allen put himself on the wrong side of the education issue - especially higher education. The Virginia business establishment, led by onetime Allen backer John T. Hazel, warned against Allen's plan to reduce funding for state-supported colleges and universities. They had already been cut deeply by his immediate predecessor, L. Douglas Wilder.
Apparently Mr. Allen has gotten the message. The two-year (1996-98) $34.6 billion budget the governor will present when the legislature meets in January calls for more money for higher education. Mr. Hazel says it's still too little to move state-supported colleges and universities toward genuine competitiveness against their peers in other Southern states. The legislature probably will vote more money. Meanwhile, the additional expenditure proposed by Mr. Allen evinces a welcome turnaround.
1995 is the year in which the General Assembly accommodated the gun lobby by easing the way for Virginians yearning to carry concealed weapons. The National Rifle Association assures everyone that an armed society is a polite society, but guns left around the house by adults leads to an appalling toll in the accidental and intentional shootings.
Mr. Allen's slimming of state government - except for prisons - is generally approved. The first reports of the state's phased-in welfare reforms, enacted since Mr. Allen took office, seem to be working. In rural Virginia, recipients are moving from welfare to work. Time will disclose whether results will be as positive when the program is expanded to inner-city neighborhoods.
It is also too early to say what will happen when Medicaid recipients are switched from traditional fee-for-service care to managed care, but Mr. Allen rightly pursues reform. A danger inherent in for-profit HMOs is that patient care will be skimped to boost profits.
Historians will almost surely praise Mr. Allen's industry-recruiting successes. In 1995, Motorola announced it would build a multibillion-dollar computer-chip plant near Richmond, IBM and Toshiba prepared to place a similar large operation at Manassas and Gateway 2000 announced it would open a computer-assembly plant on the Peninsula. Other states might have gotten these plants. Because they are coming to Virginia, Mr. Allen earned credit for them.
The budget Mr. Allen has fashioned would transfer all economic-development marketing functions from the dismantled Department of Economic Development to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership created by the 1995 General Assembly. It calls for the Assembly to create a Department of Business Assistance to serve businesses already in the state.
Mr. Allen gained much business-community support for his gubernatorial candidacy by promising to sharpen Virginia's economic-development focus. He's kept that promise and the state is reaping the rewards. 1995 was a good year for the Old Dominion, although the state's economic growth lagged the nation's. But with economic development a priority and absent another recession, 1996 could well be better. by CNB